First Time For Everything
by InfinitusX
Summary: There's a first time for everything, and every moment is a smaller story within the larger story of a life. M2-centric, from grandfathers and friends to kidnappings, gunsmoke and an end. A series of short interconnected pieces posing as a one-shot.


**First Time for Everything**

Genre: general

Characters/Pairing: M&M, Matt-centric

Disclaimer: don't own

Warnings: made-up stuff, believability issues, language (definitely), name spoilers (duh), ch.99/ep.35 spoilers (duh), certain adult themes (mostly later)

Notes: Really, this was just an excuse to have Wammy as a grandfatherly figure for Matt, and to play with various other ideas about Matt.

Language/Style Notes: Self-betaed. Third person limited narration, Matt-centric.

-

**Family**

The first time Mail ever met the benefactor of Bethel Home, he was four and had just been caught doing something he probably shouldn't have in the eyes of many. But from the first, Mail had decided that Mister Quillsh Wammy was perfect grandpa material.

He couldn't remember ever having parents, even though one of his first memories was of lying on his back in his crib under a spinning mobile, and a shaft of sunlight falling across his tiny kicking feet and keeping them warm. He only knew about grandparents from the stories the other kids would tell, happy, sad, and angry stories about family that they missed bitterly or had only been too glad to be rid of. He couldn't remember siblings or aunts or uncles, and that was OK - what he couldn't remember, he reasoned, he wouldn't have occasion to miss, so really he was better off in that respect.

Still, he'd always been a little jealous, especially when the older kids talked about family they'd loved. Mail couldn't ever remember having someone who loved him.

In the meantime, he made do with what he had. Mail, using the wiles of a child who knows he's adorable and his honest longing for love and belonging, had convinced Sister Anna, the best of the women who looked after the children between two and five, to let him adopt her as his First Aunt. She was a kind woman, Mail knew, and she always had a place for him on her lap whenever he needed it, even allowing him to curl up with her at her desk as she filled out the requisite paperwork that came with her job.

The same tactics had gained him several other 'aunts' of the same variety and even a few 'uncles' - some wealthy benefactors of the orphanage, shopkeepers in the surrounding town, and so on. He had no replacement parents. That was all right, he decided; some things were impossible to be properly replaced, and he was happy, on the whole, with his adopted family, who kept him from feeling too lonely. The other kids tended to avoid him, because he used big words that they couldn't understand, read the dictionary in his spare time, and had a damnably good memory that could pick a troublemaker out of a crowd of scruffy children at fifty paces.

Quillsh Wammy had started this orphanage years ago, often returning to check up on his little flock. Some of the older kids remembered him, talked with admiration of the old man who always came with pockets full of amusing and endearing little gadgets that he'd made himself; he was an inventor, they said, and the reason why their toys were so much neater than any other child's could possibly be. Mail listened quietly to these stories, and wondered a little guiltily if maybe that meant that he shouldn't be taking them apart and rebuilding them to be something else, especially since they usually didn't work.

His visits were regular and often kept secret until he'd actually arrived. So it was that Mail was busily taking apart one of the little gadgets that so fascinated him when he was interrupted by footsteps and a deep, kindly old voice saying, "And what are you up to, my boy?"

He jumped, and crouched over his mess a little guiltily, because he wasn't supposed to be using tools and he most certainly was not supposed to be taking apart anything that Mr. Wammy had given them, even if it was almost broken anyways and barely anyone played with it any more. "Um, um, um -" he squeaked, and then the old man, the oldest and most elegant that Mail had ever seen, like a grand old butler from some black and white film, was lowering himself to the floor beside him and prodding at the mess he'd made.

He didn't know who the old man was; he'd never seen him around before, and his embarrassment at being caught was almost forgotten in his fascination with the new person.

"Figuring out what makes it tick?" the old man said.

"That bit does," Mail said, and pointed at the complex little part that he had determined was some sort of motor.

"Very good," said the old man. "You're right, of course. What were you planning to do with it?"

"Put it back together with the other one," Mail said promptly, forgetting his fear in the absence of anger from the old man and in the presence of his obvious interest. "I thought it could make something new."

"Show me this other one," the old man asked, and Mail, normally understandably reticent about his guilty little hobby, found himself going right to his hidden box of extra parts and half-dismantled machinery, and spreading the relevant contents on the floor in front of him.

"It's like a puzzle," Mail said. "It all fits together, somehow, except if I just rearrange the pieces I can get something that it never was before. I just can't do it properly yet."

The old man smiled. "It's the best kind of puzzle," he said, and ruffled Mail's hair. Mail found that he didn't mind, if it was this person. "Would you like me to show you something? If you want to learn more, that is."

"Sure," Mail said eagerly, and he watched as the old man picked up the screwdriver he'd been using. His movements were incredibly deft, and he could barely move his eyes fast enough to catch what he was doing. His voice provided a steady, confident stream of explanations that Mail was able to keep up to, however, and things were starting to fall into place now.

"Mr. Wammy!" Sister Anna's voice came from the doorway, startling both mechanics out of their concentration. The old man looked up, almost as guiltily as Mail did. "What are you doing there? You're not showing him how to dismantle things better, are you?"

"Of course not," said the old man - Mr. Wammy, managing to look dignified even on his knees and with greasy fingers. "Any fool can dismantle a thing, but it takes a certain skill to put them back together."

So this was the famed Mr. Wammy. Mail stared at him, suddenly shy, but the old man, after a few more words with the good sister, turned back to the task at hand with a quiet smile just for Mail.

"I like you," he said, suddenly, and for no logical reason that he could determine, and Mr. Wammy looked both surprised and pleased at that.

"Thank you, dear boy," he said. "You've made me feel young again. What's your name?"

"Mail," he said. "And you're Mr. Wammy the inventor. Can you teach me how to invent things too?"

"I can teach you how to put things together," Mr. Wammy said, "but you have to teach yourself how to invent. It's something in here," he said, tapping Mail on the forehead, "and in here," tapping him over the heart. "Gut instinct and intuition. Something that I think you may already possess without knowing it."

No one was altogether surprised at the end of Mr. Wammy's four-day stay at the Bethel Home that Mail had all but begged Mr. Wammy to allow him to adopt him as a grandfather. Mail had gone around all but glowing for most of that time, and for several weeks after, and for about a week after each letter he got back from the old man answering some of his myriad questions and giving him news of how he was doing.

No one was even really surprised when Mr. Wammy returned a year later, when Mail was five, and asked him if he'd like to move to the orphanage where he spent the majority of his time. You didn't have to be there to know that the little boy's eyes had lit up like Christmas lights, and you didn't have to be a genius, mechanical or otherwise, to know that Mail, an affectionate boy at the best of times, had flung his arms around the old man and declared that day to be the best day ever, and Mr. Wammy the best adopted grandfather to ever grace the face of the earth.

None of the kids were sorry to see him go, either, though his adopted aunts and uncles would have rather he stayed.

-

**Fight**

The first time Mail ever met his eventual best friend at Wammy's House, it ended in a bloody nose for Mail.

He'd never had other boys and girls around him who actually understood him when he used difficult polysyllabic words. He'd never had other boys and girls accept him into their circles, even seek him out to come play with them. He'd watched other children play with friends before, but he'd never had another person his own age actually enjoy being around him before.

To be honest, most of the time it frightened him. Accustomed to being alone, being confronted everywhere he looked with social interaction was more than a little scary. He liked to hide in his corner and play with his gadgets or the video game console that Wammy had bought him for Christmas just before the end of the year when he'd brought him back to Wammy's House with him.

He liked to sneak into Wammy's laboratory workshop when he knew his adopted grandfather was there and watch him, filling the empty spaces with questions, and words that spilled forth easily with Wammy as they did with no one else. Wammy was always glad to see him, but never asked him to come or forced him to do anything that he didn't want to. Everyone else kept asking him to join in, and make friends. Mail didn't want to.

Well, that was a lie - he did, but he had no idea how to go about doing so.

He honestly had no idea what he was doing when he walked into the common room one day to see some new kid with a face like an angel and a temper like a demon trying to take the toys away from a little albino boy of about Mail's own age. Instead of going and sitting in his corner, ignoring everyone, as he normally did, he walked over and said, "Stop that."

Both boys stared at him, amazed. The little boy, small, soft, chubby, looking like some sort of doll - was his name Nate or was that some other boy? - had had tears forming in his eyes. If there was one thing Mail couldn't stand, it was tears, especially when a bigger kid was the cause.

"Excuse me?" said the new kid, turning his stare like rusty knives on Mail, arrogant and self-righteous, and for the first time Mail realized that he might have just put himself willingly in harm's way for the sake of another. Maybe he'd been too hasty after all.

"I said stop that. Those are his toys that he brought with him when he came. They're not yours, so leave him alone."

"... No," said the new kid, and went back to trying to take Nate's toys, though the boy had taken the opportunity of distraction to gather them in and cover them with his body like a turtle's shell.

In retrospect, it had been a bad idea for Mail to lose his temper, walk up, and smack him. The new kid was older, taller, stronger, faster, but it certainly allowed Nate to get away unmolested, a small comfort as Mail later sat in the infirmary with a wad of gauze against his nose and the nurse tried to decide whether it was broken or not.

When he walked out of the infirmary - nose mercifully unbroken - the new kid was out there, face like a thundercloud, but forced into obedience by the stern face of Wammy, who was standing directly behind him with a strong grip on his shoulder.

"Mihael has something to say to you," Wammy said, and Mail was a little frightened in spite of himself, because he couldn't remember ever hearing the old man sound so cold and unapproachable, even if it wasn't directed at him.

The new boy - Mihael - refused to meet his eyes, but he was very pale and his eyes were red. "You OK?" he said, roughly.

"It was just a nosebleed," Mail said coolly. "And some bruises and scratches and stuff."

"Well," said Mihael, and twisted in Wammy's grip. "Can I go now?" he asked.

"Mihael had something else to say to you," Wammy said, unmoved.

"No," said Mihael, colour rushing to his face. "No I didn't."

"Mihael," Wammy said warningly.

"It's OK, Mr. Wammy," Mail said with dignity. "If he's not actually sorry there's no point in forcing it." He gritted his teeth, turned to the boy. "It's OK, Mihael," he said quietly, and the boy started. "You didn't really hurt me that badly. I shouldn't have hit you first."

It was very, very difficult to admit it in front of his adopted grandfather, but he wanted to shame that boy, and the best way to do it was to be brutally honest. He didn't stay. He ran off, heading for the one safe place where he knew he was always welcome.

Wammy found him under his worktable about half an hour later, knelt, and pulled him onto his lap without a word. Mail wrapped his arms around the old man, knowing he was forgiven but still feeling terrible about it.

"I'd like you to try to get along with Mihael," he said at last. "The boy desperately needs a friend."

"He hates me," Mail said, after a moment of thought. "I'd rather not have someone who hates me for my first friend."

"He doesn't hate you," Wammy said. "Mihael is heedless, and you were simply in the way of what he wanted. You should hear why from him first, but I do want you to understand that he was very upset when he saw he'd made you bleed so badly. I think his intentions are better than his actions."

"I'd rather be friends with Nate," Mail mumbled. "At least Nate doesn't bully littler kids."

"Why not be friends with both of them?" Wammy said with a smile. "My boy, you're always alone."

"I like it like that," Mail muttered. "I don't know what to do with friends."

"It's like having a grandfather your own age," Wammy said, "but better."

"Oh," said Mail.

He spent the rest of the day working close by Wammy at his worktable, but that didn't stop him thinking about making friends.

-

**Sympathy**

The first time Mail decided that maybe Wammy was right about Mihael was the same day that seven-year-old Corbin got a concussion on the play equipment in the courtyard and started bleeding copiously from a head wound. Mail had been perched on a swing nearby, trying to decide whether today was the day that he would try to make friends with Nate or if he was too scared of messing up. Mihael had been climbing on the monkey bars between him and Nate, however, who sat on the grass with his Transformers and toy planes on the other side of the play area, so he was seriously leaning towards being too scared.

Corbin never looked where he was going; so at approximately that moment in time, the monkey bars rose out of what must have seemed like nowhere, and he'd smacked into an upright pole and fell to the ground.

There was a huge commotion on the playground when he started to bleed, and some kids ran for Wammy and others ran off for the nurse and a couple ran off to get Mr. Ruvie. Even Nate got up off the ground and came over to see if the boy was OK.

It was only after Corbin had been bundled off to the infirmary that Mail noticed that Mihael, usually the first at the scene of any trouble and asking questions, was conspicuous by his absence; nor had he been one of the children to run off and get help.

Not that it mattered. Now that the situation was resolved, Mail felt better about leaving the playground and returning to his room, where his gameboy waited and there was no one around to bleed copiously at him. He'd felt a little nauseous, watching that. Another day he would go and make friends with Nate.

Those were his intentions, until he found Mihael in the fetal position in a high window-seat, dead white and all but hyperventilating.

"Are you all right?" he said, stopping dead. There was something very frightening about the strange new boy like this, like he might have a fit or something.

Mihael took one more shuddering, controlling breath and unfolded a little, dropping his head against the window, looking ill and tired. "Oh. It's you," he said.

"You don't look very good," Mail said. "Is it because of the blood?"

"I am not scared of blood!" Mihael snapped, curling up again.

"I got sick too," Mail said, because that was a lie if he'd ever heard one, and he wondered why such a tough boy got so upset at the sight of blood.

"I told you -!"

"OK," Mail said. "OK, fine. You told me. I'll leave you alone now."

He turned and was walking away when he felt a cold hand grip his shoulder.

"You." Mihael's voice was unsteady. "Don't tell anyone or I'll hit you."

Mail had done his best to be nice, and this was the best response he could get? He didn't even like this jerk. Why had he bothered to try?

"And make me bleed again?" he said coldly, took pleasure in watching the other boy look taken aback. "I'm not stupid, Mihael. And even if you're a cowardly bully, I don't tell secrets. Maybe if you didn't hit everyone who tried to be nice to you, you'd have friends and you'd know that some people just don't do that sort of thing."

"That's not what I meant!"

Mail blinked; he'd almost been able to physically see something in Mihael bursting apart at his words. He'd hit the weak part of a dam, apparently.

"I meant I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to, but that I'd rather you didn't." There was something shamed, almost scared, in Mihael's face, and Mail blinked up at him again, astonished to see someone hurting and unhappy peeking out at him from behind that deceiving beautiful mask.

"Oh," Mail said, finally. "OK."

"You won't tell anyone that -?"

"No," said Mail, because Mihael was being very intense and it was scaring him, which was why until the day he died he could never figure out why he blurted out what he did, or where he found the courage. Maybe it was what Wammy had said, and finally seeing that it was at least somewhat true.

"I have video games in my room," he said. "Want to come play with me?"

Mihael's mouth fell open in surprise, and suddenly Mail realized that he had asked of Mihael what he'd fully intended to ask only of Nate, and he froze up, terrified. Was he insane? Mihael had beat him up, had fully intended to do so again, picked on little kids - so why -?

But suddenly there was colour in Mihael's cheeks again, and something like interest and cautious respect in his eyes, and Mail felt himself thawing as Mihael looked away and said, "OK."

He could make friends with Nate some other day.

-

**Accident**

The first time that Mail realized that he and Mihael were all but inseparable was the day that something in Wammy's lab blew up while he and Wammy were in there, and he woke up in the infirmary with unusual pressure on his left hand and bandages all over.

The nurse was changing his bandages on the right side of his face; from the left, he could see another curtained-off area farther down, wondered if it was Wammy, wondered if he was OK. He was comfortable, even if he hurt, and quite badly, and the pressure on his left hand increased suddenly as the nurse peeled off the last layer of cotton and gauze away from his face to reveal what, to Mail, felt sticky and wet and disgusting.

Someone's hand, he realized a few seconds later, was the source of the unfamiliar pressure.

"Mihael," he said, unable to turn and see if he was right, but sure that only one person that liked him would react that way to the sight of a wound.

"You'll be OK, Mail," said Mihael, and his voice was almost frighteningly fierce. "It was just a little accident. Nothing serious. You'll be fine."

"Mr. Wammy -?"

"He's fine, dear," said the nurse, gently pushing his hair out of the way so she could put fresh bandages on. "You can see him when you're better."

"I want to see him now," Mail protested, but the nurse pushed him back down and Mihael gripped his hand so hard he thought he was losing the circulation.

Mihael stayed by him, providing a river of rapid, nervous, nearly nonsensical words that didn't seem quite like they were coming from him. Mail wanted to turn over and look at him properly, make sure it was really him and that he wasn't just dreaming it, but the nurse wouldn't let him, and anyways every time the nurse peeled away another bandage, Mihael's hand tightened on his, and he could feel his pulse race.

When the nurse left him alone, telling him to rest, Mail shifted to face Mihael anyways and said, quietly so that no one else might accidentally hear, "You didn't have to stay, you know."

"Maybe I wanted to," Mihael snapped.

"But you hate looking at injured people," Mail said.

"So?"

He was very white, very tense, but he obviously had no intentions of moving any time soon, so Mail just said: "Thanks." Mail wasn't stupid; he knew the Mihael from not all that many months ago would have abandoned him until he was up and about again, and it was really a very nice sort of feeling to have a friend who would sacrifice something to stay with him.

"You stupid little brat," said Mihael, and his eyes burned, snapping and crackling like a whole forest ablaze. "What the hell is with you and doing things you shouldn't?"

He didn't really mean it, Mail was pretty sure - 'stupid little brat' was as close to a pet name for him as Mihael was willing to give to anyone - but he'd never heard him sound quite like this. It was only after, when he'd seen Wammy and Wammy had all but had a nervous breakdown in relief that he realized that he'd probably almost died that day, and that what he'd heard in Mihael's voice was just him trying to deal with the fact that he'd almost lost the only person willing to put up with him.

-

**Secret**

The first time Mihael ever told him a secret was scarred into him for life; it was the day that Mail had forgiven every strange hitch in his behavioural patterns, and the first time he'd ever seen Mihael look so helpless. Mail had only been out of the infirmary for a couple of days when he was woken up at two in the morning by someone pounding on his door.

Muzzy with sleep, Mail shuffled out of bed and opened the door, falling backwards as Mihael pushed past him, nervous and twitching.

"Hey, can I come in? Thanks."

"It's late," Mail said, after staring stupidly at his friend for a few long moments and only then realizing that the door was still open, and Mihael was busy flicking every light in the room on. He shut it, remembered himself enough to yank his towel off the hook behind the door and tuck in into the crack at the bottom to make it look as though his lights were still out like they were supposed to be. "What are you doing up so late?"

"Couldn't sleep," he said, sitting down on Mail's sleep-tangled bed only to pop back up again a few seconds later. "No, I did sleep, but it wasn't getting me anywhere so I quit trying."

"I was sleeping," Mail informed him, curling back up on his bed, feeling sleep threatening to overtake him again even as he said it. "Why did you come wake me up?"

"Couldn't sleep," Mihael said again. "It's -" he hesitated, looked agonized for a second, and then said, "Mail, you don't tell secrets, do you?"

"No, 'course not," Mail said, blinking hard to stay awake.

"Good," he said, "because I'm going to go insane."

"...What?" Mail sat up properly, suddenly concerned. "What is it?"

"It's just the news," Mihael said, and sat down beside Mail, drawing his skinny legs up to his chest, pajama pants making his shins look like the wing-bones of a bat. "You watched it today, right?"

"Yeah," Mail said, and gave his friend an odd look; he couldn't quite credit what he was hearing. "Are you saying that... that guy, the murderer who did a runner from the prison... is he worrying you?"

"It's not like that," Mihael snapped, buried his face in his knees. "... Well, OK, it is, but it's not just because it's scary. I'm not a pansy. I... It's..."

He looked up suddenly, face dead white, eyes almost manic as they fixed him in place like a bug on a pin. "You have to swear never to tell anyone else, ever," he said in a low voice so intense that Mail couldn't help but shiver.

"O... OK, Mihael. I swear."

"It's because I know that guy," he said, and Mail stared at him in suspicion. It seemed pretty far-fetched, which either meant that Mihael was lying to excuse his fear - something it wasn't unknown for him to do - or he really was telling the truth.

"How?" Mail asked bluntly.

"Because my mother shoved me into the closet and told me to be quiet just before he walked in smeared in my dad's blood and killed her in front of me."

Mail didn't know where his breath had gone, and he didn't know if he should be looking for it or listening to Mihael, because Mihael was still talking, in a dull, distant sort of voice that told him that his friend was definitely not lying.

"He used to be in love with my mother, I heard afterwards. They didn't want me to, but I wasn't going to be told I was too young to know why that had happened to them. He was in love with her, but she married my dad, but he kept trying to get her to come back to him - like, stalking her, I guess, was what I got - she put a restraining order on him, moved without warning and only gave her new address out to close friends and family. And they were saying that he'd still thought he'd had a chance, until I was born. They had to lock him up. He was... I don't know. Insane, obsessed... something. Scary."

"Mihael," he said, and found his breath again. "Mihael, don't."

"If he'd found me, I'd be dead too," Mihael said.

"But he doesn't know you're here, does he? How could he? He's not going to... to try to -"

"No, you're right," Mihael said, and slumped backwards against Mail's pillow. "You're right, I know that, but I keep thinking about it, remembering... watching my mom die, having to watch him do... things to her, and hurt her, and having to hear her scream and not being able to make a sound because -"

Mail saw Mihael shudder, felt rather like shuddering himself. He couldn't imagine having to go through anything more awful than that. No wonder Mihael was so strange about blood... no wonder he was so rough around the edges, it must still be so hard to deal with what had happened, almost impossible.

"You can stay here tonight," Mail said, and shoved over against the wall. "If... if you want."

Mihael said nothing, but he slid down under the covers, still curled up around himself, and Mail put a cautious, daring hand on his arm as he slid down beside him, barely on his own pillow.

Neither one fell asleep again for a long time, but eventually Mail saw Mihael's eyes grow heavy and close, and he was grateful that maybe his presence had gifted his friend with a few hours of semi-peaceful sleep when he'd thought he never could.

-

**Abandoned**

The first time that Matt - only months previously Mail - fell completely and utterly apart was a cold day in late November, a few weeks before Mello's - previously Mihael's - fifteen birthday. It was a quiet grey Sunday afternoon. Matt had finished all the homework that he cared to think about for that day, and was curled up in an armchair playing a video game on his modified handheld in the common room when Roger walked in and called Near - Nate, the boy Matt never had ended up really making friends with after all - down to his office. He didn't think much of it. It was unusual, of course, but also none of his business.

It was at supper, with no sign of Mello anywhere, that he first started to worry. Mello never skipped meals; insane as he could be about beating Near, and being the best, at pushing himself as hard as he could go so that people might admire him for once, he never forgot to take care of himself like that.

Matt, afraid that Mello was sick, ate quickly and wrapped some of the bread they'd gotten at supper in a couple of napkins, in case he was feeling really under the weather and couldn't eat much more than that.

He caught sight of a boy in white pajamas trying to make his way across the dining hall to him. Near was making one of his attempts to be friendly, Matt judged, but he was good at slipping by the other boy, and escaped from the dining hall without being stopped, and ran all the way back to Mello's room.

"Mello? Hey Mello, are you awake? Wakey-wakey... you missed supper."

Silence from Mello's room, and when Matt tried the door it was locked. There was no light on underneath; where the hell could he be?

"Oy, answer me already!" Matt yelled, and knocked harder.

"He's not there," came a quiet voice from behind him.

Matt turned, saw Near standing there, slightly hunched over as was his wont, watching him silently.

"So where'd he go, then?" Matt said, perhaps with more of a challenge in his voice than was strictly necessary. He might have liked Near, if he hadn't been Mello's friend... he didn't know. Mello's rivalry with the number-one child at the institute was far beyond his control, sometimes his comprehension, and that meant that if Matt wanted to remain completely in Mello's good graces that liking Near was sort of out of the question.

"Do you not know?" Near blinked, slow and solemnly, and that was one thing that Matt didn't think he had ever liked about Near: there was no possible way to read what he was thinking from his face.

"If I knew, would I be asking?" Matt blew out a breath. "Never mind, I'll go look for him."

"Matt," Near said, as Matt strode past him. "You're not going to find him."

"I think I'd know that better than you would," Matt said coolly. "He's my friend, after all."

"You don't know what happened when Roger called me to his office this afternoon, do you."

It wasn't a question. Matt felt a sudden thread of apprehension run through him.

"No."

"Matt, can I ask you a personal question?"

"... Um, what does this have to do with anything?"

"Are you anywhere near as emotional as Mello is? I'm afraid I don't know you well enough to judge for myself and I need to be completely honest and clear about what has happened."

"Mello is in a category all by himself," Matt said, curious. "No, I'm usually pretty unflappable. Why?"

"L is dead," Near said simply, "and so is Mr. Wammy. Mello, as second-in-line, has refused to work with me, and I believe it was his intention to leave the House entirely almost immediately. As you cannot find him, I would hazard a guess that he is already gone."

It wasn't that Matt hadn't known the hazards of L and Wammy working together in Japan on the Kira case. It wasn't that he hadn't half-expected something like this all along. He'd known, and it still felt like someone had dealt him a physical blow to the solar plexus, because even though he'd _known_, it was L Near was talking about now, and Wammy.

Wammy, that kind old man who had seemed... not invincible, but certainly almost completely impervious to harm, like a graceful historical monument that had stood the test of centuries, of fire and wind and earthquakes and floods, and still remained, weathered and perhaps a little worse for wear, but always there, looming in the mind's eye... impossible to imagine the world without.

And Mello had left, without a word of good-bye.

It wasn't like being shot, as Matt would learn from later experience. It wasn't like being stabbed, or burned, or anything. It was a sort of numbness that filled him, disbelieving and black and terrible, and numbness wasn't suppose to _hurt_, but he did.

"Oh," Matt said, and even he could tell how hollow he sounded, as though a giant had just scooped out his insides in one go with a giant spoon. "I guess I'll go back to my room, then. See you tomorrow, Near."

He never knew whether Near thought him truly unflappable or if he could hear him balancing on the edge of collapse, and he never cared enough to find out either. Somehow he made it back to his room with a face like stone, and into the bathroom for the longest, hottest shower he had ever subjected himself to, and then, still naked, into bed. It took him a long time to fall asleep, staring with unblinking, burning eyes into the dark, so dry that it was painful.

He woke screaming at three in the morning, and he stuffed his mouth with his blanket to muffle his cries of grief and betrayal. Shit happened, he knew; he'd gotten off pretty easy for his first almost-thirteen years of life, and if he woke up everyone else on the floor, no one would ever let him live it down or stop teasing him, even if they knew the truth. His nerves were raw and frayed by the time he finally slipped back into sleep just before the sun came up.

Matt didn't go to classes that day, and told Linda he thought it was the twenty-four hour flu when she came to check on him.

He set his alarm for the next morning the same as usual, and as far as he knew, no one ever guessed that the Matt who sat quietly in class from that day forward was any different than he had been two days before.

-

**Negation**

The first lie Matt told that ever came back to haunt him was a single word.

Another grey Sunday afternoon; the air was chill, with no hint yet of spring to come. Matt had been planted in front of the television for hours, playing his games, every now and then shutting it off and making a few incomprehensible adjustments to a half-built mechanical object nestled on a dirty white sheet, to keep grease-spots off the carpet, and then returning to his game. He was languid and apathetic and not really all that interested in either, but long years of habit and intense interest in both had left their mark; he could not simply sit still doing nothing.

He'd been a lot more apathetic as of late. He didn't have enough energy to do anything about it.

The phone rang suddenly and Matt scooted over to the small table at the head of his bed where it sat on its stand, and reached up to grab it without bothering to get up. "Hello?" he said, feeling a momentary flicker of interest. Though all students had a phone line in their rooms, Matt's had rarely been used, except occasionally to talk to Wammy, when he'd been gone for a long time and he was desperately lonely. No one else called him; he called no one.

"Hey," said the voice, and Matt's head was suddenly filled to bursting with legions of important questions: where have you been, why didn't you call earlier, are you all right, where are you now, why are you calling now, what do you want from me, why didn't you ask me to come with you?

What he said was, "Oh. It's you."

"You miss me?" said Mello's voice in his ear, confident, cool, unconcerned, and every question that had filled Matt's head was suddenly subsumed by a freezing cold flash of anger.

"No," he said, his voice approaching absolute zero, and he hung up without waiting for Mello to say another word, and then unplugged the phone before he could call back.

-

**Drifting**

The first plane Matt ever rode on was a trans-Atlantic flight to Gander, Newfoundland, where he made the layover that took him on a meandering tour the rest of the way to Phoenix, Arizona. He'd pulled the name out of a hat, basically; it was someplace to go, and there had to be something to do there, and he'd never lived in a desert before. Those seemed good enough reasons; someone with Matt's talents could find work anywhere, in a place like a mechanic's shop or as tech support to a major company, or as a programmer for an international supercorporation. He could do anything he damn well liked and be paid quite well for whatever he chose to do.

He wandered between jobs for a couple of months, playing video games in his spare time and keeping half an eye on the news, still half-expecting... something, he no longer knew what. It probably didn't matter. He could get any job he wanted; what good was being third at Wammy's if he couldn't?

There had to be something more to being third, he thought, but he didn't know what.

-

**Body**

The first time Matt did something more illegal than pirating things on the internet was an accident. He'd made a friend of a young Italian who belonged to a powerful mafia Family, but he hadn't thought about that at the time when Alonso asked him to do a favour for him.

Poor judgment seemed to be his forte these days, Matt realized grimly, as he drove the body of one of Alonso's former enemies out into the desert, a shovel tucked in the back of the car, Alonso back in Phoenix doing some quick explaining to the police who had just shown up at his door to investigate reports of shots.

His hands were wrinkled and blood-stained from scrubbing frantically to get the blood off the wall behind the bathtub, where he'd been at the time of the shooting. Alonso had told him a complicated and hurried story about rival clans and bounties and being the lover of the man he'd shot that Matt did not entirely get and was pretty sure that he didn't want to.

When he'd finished digging the hole and dragged the body over to the hole, rolling it in, he had to throw up, but he managed to stagger to the opposite side of the road, as far away as he could get from the scene of the crime. In the desert, all DNA evidence of him being here should be scorched away or devoured by all things that crept and crawled in the area within days, but he wanted absolutely nothing more to do with this than he had to.

He went back and filled in the hole, tramping it down and using the brush he kept in the vehicle to get rid of excess sand to sweep the area free of footprints. It was the best he could do; now he could only hope for rain, or wind, to wash the last traces away.

He never wanted to do something like that ever again.

-

**Doors**

The first time Matt got drunk was at a Family 'celebration' – nominally, but really just a way to do casual business with mafia from other cities, solidifying the network – even though he knew it was probably the most epically stupid thing he could ever hope to do.

Alonso was there as well, off flirting and drinking and occasionally involving himself in Family business, but Matt avoided him, and everyone else, and stayed in his corner, alone, watching the whole thing with paranoid eyes. Alonso was fine sober, but too loose with too much in him.

He hadn't meant to drag himself in deeper than he had been a few months ago, but Matt didn't make friends easily, and Alonso had a sort of puppyish charm that was hard to resist. He was the opposite of Mello; easy-going, prone to smiles and laughter, not particularly intelligent but more cunning than Matt would have believed anyone could be, paranoid, but not to a fault.

They worked well together as a team. A one-time favour of taking care of a body had turned into a one-time favour of watching Alonso's back as he went to deal with someone who had gone against the Family. That one-time favour had turned into a scattered group of favours involving occasionally planting cameras and bugging equipment in people's houses for him, to make sure they were behaving according to Family law. Those groups of favours had grown closer and thicker, and that had been the last point of the slide before it began to go steeply downhill, running fast and piling up.

Matt was always paranoid now, watching his back every moment of the day, watching Alonso's every second they were together, watching, watching, always on the lookout. He'd taken up smoking a month ago, in hopes of it helping to reduce the stress he was feeling. It hadn't really worked, but he didn't really want to quit now either.

He was a mess.

Surely third place, surely being someone that Quillsh Wammy had been so fond of - surely that was worth more than a life like this. Wasn't there something he should be doing, he wondered for what must have been the thousandth time, something important, something that meant something to the world and to the few people he cared about?

_Fuck it all_, he decided, and got himself another drink. The room was starting to spin; the dim lights and the colours were so pretty, like a dream, like a beautiful midsummer's night somewhere quiet and sane, separate from the mundane world and so beautiful it could make a human's heart ache.

That was what it was like, Matt decided, and finished off his glass. It wasn't a real place but it was somewhere he should be, not in this dim world of human-faced monsters, sleek and black and dangerous.

Somewhere there was a door, like... like into that one country, the one that some dead dude back in the middle of the century had written about.

Narnia. Yeah. In a closet somewhere was a door, and at the moment a closet kind of felt like a comforting idea, somewhere dark and quiet where he wouldn't have to be disturbed for a very long time.

There had to be a door, somewhere. Leading... leading out.

Yeah.

He was damned if he knew where it was, though, or what it would look like when he found it.

Alonso was suddenly at his side, laughing and holding two glasses of bright liquid. "Man, Matthew, are you pissed already? You have no tolerance, boyo."

"Sorry," Matt said, for something to say. "I guess I just don't drink all that often."

"Don't be sorry." Alonso laughed again, held out one of the two glasses – the one with the clear liquid in it – to him. Matt studied it, confused, and Alonso nudged him with it. "Here - I guess one of your friends is here, he asked me to give this to you. Or have you been flirting over here all by yourself?" He grinned expectantly, and Matt rolled his eyes, then regretted it, because that had _really_ made his head spin.

Matt took the glass from the mafia man, tasted it cautiously, expecting... moonshine, maybe, or poison, but what he tasted was nothing in particular. Water. Some smartass had sent him a glass of ice water. He drank it down. The cold sobered him up a little bit, and his head felt a little clearer. Only a little, but it was enough to start thinking a little straighter.

"Who gave this to you?" he asked, and Alonso shrugged.

"Dunno. Was pretty cute though..."

Not that that meant much. In Alonso's state, almost anyone could be considered 'cute'; and this was saying something, because in Matt's experience, no man or woman of the mafia could possibly be considered 'cute'. Seductive, sure, dangerous, definitely, drop-dead gorgeous, entirely possible. But cute? Cute was for children and animals, or for normal, harmless, slightly nerdy middle-class men and women with normal lives and normal families and friends.

So Matt forgot about it. Weird things happened all the time to him, and everyone here had been drinking for hours, so perhaps it wasn't so strange that someone would think something like that a funny joke. And Alonso was just as drunk as he was, no matter how much he insisted that he was not.

He forgot everything after awhile, and the world kind of faded out. It spun around him, pretty colours flecked by shadows, and maybe there had been something in that last drink after all, even though it had tasted fine, normal.

Matt couldn't bring himself to care; he felt loose, happy, relaxed, and nothing could make him upset right now. He'd stopped drinking. The thought passed through his mind that one of his drinks must have been drugged, and that should have been terrifying, but actually Matt just wanted to giggle a little at how easily he'd been caught, how the stress of mafia life had made him slip and fall to such a low state, to be tricked like a kid into lowering his guard. Well damn. Nothing he could do about it now...

The last thing he really remembered was the glint of gold and silver and shining black in the form of a person, and someone helping him to walk outside, and then everything disappeared.

When he woke up, he was in a strange room, and the air didn't feel so dry that his nose wanted to start spontaneously bleeding as it did most days in his own apartment.

That definitely didn't seem like a promising end to his first real night of drinking.

-

**Angel**

The first sound Matt heard other than his own rough breathing was a door slamming shut, followed swiftly by heavy booted footsteps. Each noise throbbed through his head like liquid lead. His mouth tasted horrible. When he opened his eyes, he wanted to die, and when he tried to stand up he almost lost the contents of his stomach, only maintaining them through iron will. Now was not the time to be sick. Someone was coming; he needed to find out who they were and what they wanted before he could give into weakness and his hangover.

Matt slid out of bed and positioned himself beside the door, one of his own steel-toed boots clutched in one fumbling hand. Even the lamp would have been a better weapon choice, but he didn't want to have to tug and fight with the cord when the footsteps were headed in the direction of the room he'd woken up in.

He breathed in deeply, trying to steady himself, get some balance back, and hoped that whoever it was didn't have a gun and didn't mean to hurt him.

The door swung open. Matt dropped the boot.

The person who had just entered was an angel in devil's clothing, tight black leather, silver chains and studs doing little to hide the pale golden glory of the person underneath, beautiful, so beautiful and deadly, feline and terrible.

His hair was golden as well, and perfect, and Matt suddenly understood his impression of glinting gold and silver and shining black from the night before, understood that it was this person who had led him away from the party to... to wherever this was.

He knew this person.

-

**Place**

The first thing that Matt blurted out after it had registered with his mind exactly what had happened was, "Mello."

"Thank you for dropping the boot," Mello said, and didn't turn around until he'd reached the bed and sat down. "I wasn't sure if you would. You've gotten dumb. The Matt I knew would never have accepted a drink from a stranger at a mafia gathering." His gaze pierced into Matt like so many needles, passing through and trying to look at his soul. Matt swallowed. He'd forgotten how intense Mello's eyes were. How had he forgotten that?

"Jesus fucking Christ," said Matt, blankly, and then tried to defend himself a little. "I was drunk. It didn't taste like anything except water..." He stopped, and was no longer sure whether he wanted to punch Mello out or to finally give in and be sick. "...You drugged me, you asshole."

"It was the only sure way to get you out of there without a fuss," Mello said coolly. "Your one friend is rather protective. And gay. You doing him, or something?"

"Excuse me?" Matt sputtered.

"It's a fair question," Mello said, leaning forward slightly, and his eyes gleamed like they had when he was still a teenager, and Matt wasn't sure he could hold on to his anger for very long, no matter how righteous it might have been. Or the contents of his stomach.

"Then I guess you deserve an honest answer," Matt snapped, feeling sharp and sarcastic and absolutely miserable with it. "No. No, I was doing nothing of the sort with him, freak. What the hell does that have to do with anything? You were at that gathering. Why? And why the hell did you feel the need to drug me, and drag me off to... wherever we are? And why in God's name _now_, instead of years ago when I actually still gave a damn?"

"I'm in the mafia," Mello said, as though it should have been obvious. "As for the other questions..." He hesitated, looked away. "Well, you're in Los Angeles right now."

"How the fuck did you get me to L.A?" Matt stared, everything else momentarily forgotten for surprise.

"Well, Ross and some of the others took the private jet," Mello said, "So I came back with them, and you."

"That was kidnapping," Matt said coldly.

"I know." Mello glanced at him appraisingly. "Pretty good for spur of the moment, I would say."

"I don't get any of this any more." Matt dug the heels of his hands into his face, closed his eyes, dizzy and hurting and confused as all hell. Why? _Why_ did crap like this always have to happen to him? "I don't even know what to say to that. For God's sake, Mello. Did it never occur to you to just come up and say 'hi' like a normal person would after not seeing someone for six damn years?"

"You weren't exactly polite to me the last time we spoke," Mello said sharply. "I wanted to talk to you without giving you a chance to get away."

"Couldn't you have just brought a damn pair of handcuffs or something and latched on to me until I saw sense? You fucking _drugged_ me!"

"I didn't know you would be there, and for crying out loud, shut _up_, I know I drugged you. You don't have to keep telling me." Mello glared at him, and then at his hands. "Maybe there were better ways, but I was working with what I had."

"There were better ways," Matt said, and he couldn't stop himself any longer. The question had been alternately simmering and boiling away in his head for years and years now and it needed an answer now. "If you wanted to see me and talk to me so damn badly, why did you leave me behind in the first place?"

Silence, for a long, long moment.

"We were just kids," Mello said finally. "I wasn't going to make that decision for you."

"You didn't have to, you idiot!" Matt's eyes burned and stung. Some excuse. Was that the best that Mello could come up with? He just wanted the truth, dammit. Was that too much to ask? "All you had to do was ask. It wasn't that hard. Just, 'Hey Matt, I'm cutting out of here, thought I should ask if you wanted to come too.' Five fucking seconds out of your life - that's all that would have taken."

"That's all the past. What do you expect me to do about it now?" Mello asked sharply. "It's not like you missed having me around or anything. I did call back with every intention of asking if you wanted to join me, Matt. If I recall correctly, _you_ were the one who hung up and then proceeded to disconnect the phone on me completely."

"What?"

He was having trouble believing what he had just heard, but if it was the truth... if it was the truth, Matt had screwed himself over royally.

"That was what you called for?" Matt said, weakly.

"Yes," Mello said, face dark and sulky. "I assumed after that overdramatic exit that I'd been an idiot to think of you as the only person I could trust no matter what."

Mello was probably manipulating him by this point, guilting him into admitting that it had been his fault, but the sad thing was, it was working. He'd been so angry, so... betrayed, even now, and Mello had tried...? Mello had just called him the only person he could trust.

He hadn't realized that someone had had so much faith in him.

His eyes were stinging again, but for a different reason this time. All this time, when he'd been questioning his purpose, his very existence, and he'd had one waiting for him all along, if only he'd used the genius that he supposedly possessed to see it. Mello had wanted him to come with him. He'd felt that he'd made a mistake, tried to make things right, and Matt had totally screwed it over with his stupid, stupid moment of pride.

"Mel," he said, and received a glance full of scorn.

"You don't have a right to call me that."

"Mel, I'm so sorry."

His face softened, a little. Matt kept talking, trying to find a ground they could both accept and find peace on, because angry as he was, as confused and bitter and upset as he was over everything that had happened, if Mello walked out of his life for a second time, he would be even less than he was now. Mello had always managed to provide him with a purpose, no matter how lowly that might be.

"I just - I know you had something you needed to do, but it was hard to remember, with L and Wammy dead, and you - you disappeared without a word. I found out from Near everything that had happened, I got hit with those... deaths, and you going missing, in the same span of a minute, because I don't think Near ever learned tact or subtlety when it comes to dropping bad news on a person."

Mello cracked a tired, wry smile. "No, you're right about that." He examined his hands, smile fading. "Matt... you were always really close to Wammy, weren't you?"

"I met him when I was four, and I adopted him as my unofficial grandfather three days later," Matt said, sinking to the floor, back against the wall beside the door, wondering what that had to do with anything. "Yeah. We were close."

"I didn't know that," Mello said. "I knew you shared the same obsession with gadgets, but I didn't..."

"... know that he was the closest thing I ever had to family?" Matt stared at his own hands, eyes pricking with tears. Now it was making sense. Mello was trying to see his point of view. "Yeah."

"You loved him," Mello said. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah," Matt said, and he had to bite his thumb to tamp his emotions back down. "More than just about anyone."

"Why didn't you ever tell me?" Mello demanded, sounding a little bewildered.

"I guess I thought you knew," Matt mumbled around his thumb.

"That day..." Mello said at last. "That day really fucked you up, didn't it?"

Matt exhaled, long and slow. "Kind of," he admitted. Mello did understand, in his own peculiar way.

Silence.

"Matt?"

"What?"

"I... I should have taken you with me."

From Mello, that was the closest he'd ever get to an apology.

"I know." Without warning, the tears were suddenly spilling freely down Matt's face, hot and mortifying, and he buried his face in the circle of his arms, shaking and trying to hide it.

"Shit, Matt, you're here now. Don't... don't do that." Mello sounded extremely uncomfortable.

"I lied, Mel," Matt said, muffled, to his knees.

"What?"

"I lied. When you called. All I wanted to do was make sure you were OK, but you were so arrogant, like you didn't give a damn, like it was all just a clever move in a chess game - I got so mad - I lied. I missed you like... like fucking hell, even then."

Silence.

"Matt. Matt. Stop that." He heard the rustle of sheets, footsteps, and then there was a hand on his arm and a knee between his, a feeling of eyes watching him intently.

"It's so stupid," Matt said, and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, wiping away the dampness. "All those years, and because we were just _stupid_..."

"That's in the past, Matt," Mello said, and squeezed his arm. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that this is Los Angeles. I am here; so are you. The question is, do you want to go back to your gay buddy in Phoenix and fuck around with the mafia there, or would you rather stay here and work with the L.A. mafia - with me?" he clarified, seeing Matt blinking a little at him.

"That's hardly a choice worth the words to voice it," Matt said finally.

"Voice it anyways," Mello snapped.

"I want to stay here," Matt said quietly. "After everything we just talked about, did you think I was going to walk away?"

"No," Mello said. "Because if you really had chosen to go back to Phoenix, it wouldn't have been alive."

-

**Fear**

The first time Matt realized that he was in way over his head came about due to multiple factors all snowballing together.

Firstly there was the girl Sayu, the Yagami child held captive for the faults of her brother and father. Matt had been involved in kidnappings before - but always of people within the mafia, people who had surely known the risk.

He'd never been partly responsible for snatching someone innocent, which, he saw by the cameras, she still was, in spite of everything, in spite of who her family was, and it wasn't nice and it wasn't fair, but then, the world wasn't fair or nice and it hated innocence.

Mello said it was tough shit for her, but she was helping to track down Kira, so frankly, she should have been a lot more cooperative than she was. Matt said nothing, but he was frankly relieved when her father came to ransom her; having her around was a reminder of everything he'd ever done wrong to stay somewhere he should never have wanted to be.

Second, there was Neylon. He creeped Matt out, and he spent as little time in the room with the man as possible. In another time, another place, he could have passed for a university professor, perhaps, slightly eccentric but well-liked. It was his eyes that worried him, wide and staring like the pale bulbous eyes of something long used to the darkness, and it was his eyes that could see things invisible to normal humans.

Numbers and names, Mello said, the night after Matt had walked into the room and _seen_ something far too knowing in the man's eyes when he looked at him, and Mello had said, "And not Matt's name either, it's not needed." Neylon had looked away, on the surface looking guilty, but he'd seen him looking at his little black notebook, that creepy thing that killed with names and faces, and a cold shadow had passed over Matt's heart.

Third... third, that fucking notebook. Being in the same room with it was hard to bear, but these days Mello was always in the same room with it, asking questions, studying it, figuring out its little secrets, and if he wanted to talk to his friend, it had to be done in the presence of that notebook, or he had to position himself at just the right time to catch Mello before he fell asleep, exhausted.

No one should be able to kill with words. To have someone know your name these days was like having someone who knew every dirty low-down thing you'd ever done, a time-bomb just waiting to explode. Only Neylon knew his name, and Mello.

Neylon, he'd determined, was probably too much a wuss to dare face Mello's wrath. Frankly, the person he was terrified of was Mello. And that was why he hated the fucking notebook, for being so dangerous, so stealthy, so secretly manipulative, for making him doubt the friend he'd never doubted so deeply before.

Fourth was the time he walked into the main room, had the creepy notebook shoved into his face, and batted it away only to be confronted by a shinigami. A fucking _shinigami_, and what sanity had remained in his world flew away like a bird on the wing.

To his credit, he figured, he'd been cool about it, simply blinking and saying, "Oh," at the sight of the bandaged, insectine thing with the fangs gleaming in the dull light, before walking away from Neylon's wide-eyed, pale and disbelieving stare, back to the privacy of his own quarters, and having a minor nervous breakdown there.

Fifth was Mello, who'd walked in just as Matt was getting past the hyperventilation stage, dripping wet and wearing nothing but a towel.

Matt had told him sharply to go away, that he was all right, but Mello had purposely ignored him and sat down beside him in his favourite sprawled posture, and Matt slipped back towards hyperventilation, because that towel was barely doing its duty for decency, and it was just not fucking _right_ to look at Mello of all people like that. And why was he?

The fifth factor that came into play was the realization that he thought more about Mello in a hyper-sensualized, hyper-sexual way than he had about any woman, no matter how gorgeous, that he had briefly managed to date in the past.

Mello was why he was still here, not because it was less boring, although to a certain limit that was also true. Mello held the power of life and death over him with his knowledge of his name, Mello was the one with the insane plans to beat down Near and gain more power, Mello was the one who had admitted to him that if all these men were to suddenly die because of Kira, he wouldn't give a damn.

Mello was the person he'd helped to set up the chain of explosives around the base, all wired into the same remote that stayed hidden in a desk somewhere, or with Mello at all times, a circle of deadly fire that they were all forced to live within.

Mello told him that he didn't see Matt like the others, that they were old friends, that he would never use the notebook against him, would keep him alive if at all possible. Mello was also, Matt was quite, quite sure, getting dangerously close to insanity, and as much as he wanted to trust him, he was always, always watching him. Just in case.

Matt was in over his head, and he wanted out but for the fact that he would be walking away from a few of the only things that gave his life extra meaning.

-

**Devastation**

The first time that Matt could remember being honestly and truly terrified was the night the NPA invaded, and Mello blew himself up.

He'd been woken up by Mello at about eleven after being awake for forty-eight hours running and told that someone needed to go pick up his chocolate, and slipped him some extra money for smokes of his own. Bleary and barely awake, Matt had obeyed without thinking and stumbled off to his car.

He'd stopped at a convenience store along the way and picked up a pack of cigarettes; the smoke would keep him awake long enough to get the chocolate for his friend. It came in parcels through the mail, delivered to a distant address and held there until someone could come to pick it up.

It was only after he'd driven most of the ways across the city that he remembered that the post office that the packages always came from would be closed at this time of night, and that was when he freaked out, because Mello didn't make mistakes like that and Mello would not have sent him off without a reason and hadn't he said something about shit going down - tonight, had he said _tonight?_

He saw the firebombs that he'd helped Mello set up going off halfways across the city, stuck in midnight traffic at a downtown intersection, and he knew exactly what sort of shit had gone down.

Every emergency vehicle in the city, it seemed, was making for the pillars of billowing orange smoke on the outskirts of the city, and nobody seemed to notice the crazed civilian in a beat-up red car hurtling down the highway at unreasonably high speeds towards the site of the explosion, which was strange but perhaps not unexpected.

Matt parked four blocks away and ran them, his smoker's lungs starting to protest a little as he watched the last fire truck peal away from the wreckage, and he dropped into the tall grass and tried not to breathe as the emergency vehicles left, one by one.

He'd been too late. If Mello was hurt he'd have been taken off to the hospital, the last place on Earth that Mello would have wanted to go in a time like this, because if anyone checked his records they would discover that whoever he'd claimed to be did not exist. What had happened tonight? What had made Mello - or somebody, but probably Mello - press that deadly button? How many had died?

What if Mello was one of the dead?

The stench of burned flesh, singed everything, permeated his nose, and the moment he'd begun to fancy that maybe - horribly - Mello was part of that smell had him retching in the grass, trembling, mind blank with numbing fear, and he could not lose Mello, he could not lose _Mello_ of all people like this, in a suffering, burning death, he could not lose control, it wasn't logical, and if Mello was dead, he had to find his body and make sure that he at least got a proper burial. He couldn't just leave.

So he searched the wreckage. He scoured through broken seared wood and metal like the ribs and organs of an enormous dead thing, sifted through the ashes, called into the black night until he was hoarse with it. No answer, no sign, not even a single scorched or shattered bead of the rosary around Mello's neck was left to be found anywhere.

The coals were almost dead by the time that Matt gave up. His eyes burned; it was a long time before he realized that it wasn't just the ashes stinging his eyes, bare now because his goggles were too begrimed to see through. He was weeping, in spite of himself, in spite of everything, cold and miserable and sick to his stomach.

Mello would not have let himself get taken away by anyone who might guess his real identity. If he couldn't find him, that must mean that Mello was dead, taken off to a morgue or blown into so many pieces that Matt would never be able to find them.

The idea had him retching again, dry-heaving because the last time had brought up everything that there was to bring up.

Somewhere along the way, he lost consciousness, from the stress and exhaustion and fear, because the next thing he remembered was coming to with the sun in his eyes and a splitting headache. His eyes still burned, and he covered them immediately with his goggles, heedless of the grime smearing them and making them almost impossible to see through.

What had woken him, he discovered, was his phone ringing.

Panic seized him for no obvious reason, but he snatched it up immediately and held it to his ear. "Hello?" he said, voice thick and shaky.

"Matt," said a hoarse voice on the other end, and Matt was on his feet without knowing it, head whirling at the sound of the familiar, familiar voice.

"You're alive," Matt said, dumbly - something like joy beginning to leap through him like fire. "I thought you were dead when I couldn't find you anywhere."

"I'm alive," Mello repeated. "I'm in a hospital. I need you to come and get me out. I can't stay here."

"Of course," Matt said, thankfully - Mello was alive, he was irritable and sulky and perfectly OK. "Tell me what to do."

-

**Feeling**

The first time that Matt realized that he'd been half in love with Mello all along was the same night that he fell all the way. Mello was breaking things, not in a deliberate sort of way, but absent-mindedly, as though he didn't realize that he was, and it came to him in a quiet, pooling thought as Mello sat ripping stuffing absently out of one of the cushions on the couch.

He'd let Mello get up and walk around the apartment that day, and he'd known that one of the first places he would go would be straight to the bathroom, where there was a mirror, to check whether the extent of his injuries matched the extent of his pain. He said he was checking to make sure Matt hadn't been lying about something that might have been infected, and - Matt knew, although Mello would never admit it, probably didn't even realize it was a reason - to see how much of his vanity he was going to have to sacrifice on the altar of necessity.

Since that morning, he'd shattered three plates, two glasses, broken a strut on one of the wooden chairs, dented the side of the TV, and scored the top of the coffee table all to shit. He'd been very quiet, talking little more than he had all this time when his only words had been demands for painkillers or fresh bandages, and breaking things.

The scars were different, Matt understood that. Hard to accept. Physical markings of the fire that was always burning inside Mello, scarring him, changing him, making him into someone that Matt wasn't always sure he liked.

Mello. Mihael. The scared tough kid who'd always hated blood, who let it run freely now to make his own way forward. An asshole, an arrogant bastard, a child who felt inferior no matter what he did, who pretended not to give a shit about the world but cared deeply how it judged him. A mess.

_I don't know why I love him so much_. That thought milled slowly across his brain for several minutes as he sat there, watching Mello working on destroying the couch as well, before it finally sunk in.

_Oh._

It was true; it had been in him all along, just lying there, waiting for its time, sending out hints and tendrils of knowledge until it could slide itself, full-blown, into position in Matt's head. And sit there, not festering or thriving, just... there.

"Mel, what did the couch ever do to you?" Matt asked him, the first thing he said to Mello with that knowledge become conscious, an anticlimax to a personal revelation that was best kept secret. Mello blinked, and then looked at the cottony intestines of the cushion strewn all across the floor, mildly nonplussed.

"You be ready to move again soon?" Mello said, finally.

'If you're sure you're up to it," Matt said.

"I'm fine," Mello said, and Matt thought, but did not say: _Liar. You've never been all right._

"Then say the word," Matt said. "I never really unpacked anyways." That was all he dared to say, about what he would do for Mello if asked.

"We're going to New York," Mello told him, and because it was Mello, Matt would go.

-

**Addictions**

The first time he kissed Mello, it came out of nowhere, like rain on a cloudless day.

Mello burned his picture, and when it was ashes, he got up, went to get himself a chocolate bar. Matt followed him, the abortive beginnings of... something in his head that he didn't understand the source of, and when Mello turned around, he gripped his shoulders and caught his mouth with his own, and Mello went as still as a statue. It didn't even occur to him that it _was_ a kiss until he'd released Mello's lips.

"I'm going to get more cigarettes," Matt said, because what else _could _he say, after doing something so apparently random? "Want anything from the store?"

"No," Mello said, giving him an odd look, but he said nothing more.

Matt left, and went and got his cigarettes.

He started smoking them on the way back as it occurred to him that Mello might want retribution for the incredibly gay move he'd just pulled. He hadn't known he meant to until it was too late; well, that certainly showed him why it was a bad idea to hide things like that in the dark parts of his brain and hope they would never come to light.

Apparently his thoughts were afraid of the dark. It figured. He should have known; now he had to deal with the consequences.

He walked in and straight into Mello, who twitched the cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it, grinding it under his heel on the linoleum of the entryway.

"What the fu -?"

Mello's kiss was hard and hungry, and totally unexpected. He'd been expecting Mello to take the cigarette and grind it out on his arm or something, causing pain before telling him that if he dared pull something like that again he was dead meat. He'd been expecting Mello to ice over and treat him like a stranger. He'd expected Mello not to be there when he got back, in fact, but what he had not expected was that Mello would have liked it.

Pinned against the door, Mello's hands gripping his wrists so tightly that it hurt, barely able to breathe because Mello's lips were in the way, it occurred to Matt that maybe - just maybe - he hadn't been as alone in his obsession as he'd thought.

"You need to stop smoking," Mello told him disdainfully, pulling his mouth away seconds before Matt became completely positive that he was going to pass out. "You taste horrible."

"Then keep your tongue out of my damn mouth if you don't like it," Matt shot back. He was breathing hard; it probably wasn't very convincing. Mello made a scornful noise, and it became rapidly clear that his mouth was desired for something other than talking. Apparently Mello didn't really care all that much.

And that was as close to a discussion about what they were getting into as they ever had.

-

**Purge**

The first - and last - time that they had sex was two hours before they left to initiate the final move, the trick that would bring everything together and let Near bring Kira down at long last.

Matt knew it was desperation, a need to feel alive one more time, it was comfort and fear and little else. He knew it from the moment Mello cornered him after he'd purged his computers of their memory and shut them down for the last time, knew it from the moment Mello had said, several days before, casually as though he were talking about taking a walk through the park to get ice cream: "We could die, you know, but if you're careful you should be all right."

Because he'd meant: _I'm going to die. It will only work if I make myself a martyr for the cause, and do this one thing that Near could never, ever do. But you, Matt, you don't have to._

He didn't want Mello to die. So when Mello kissed him as the final computer screen went black, he kissed back with all the need and love and desperation that had been building up within him ever since they'd agreed that this was what had to happen.

And Mello understood what it meant; that was why they ended up on the floor, naked and moving together, all desperate touches and terrified kisses, bittersweet pleasure mixed with pain and grief and something like love and the taste of chocolate and ashes, the taste that had come to mean a place like safety, a place like home.

It was over far too soon, but Mello refused to let go, burying his face against Matt's chest, still trembling, burning feverishly hot, eyes like rusty blades, now half-lidded and red.

Mello's voice was barely audible, but matter-of-fact and unashamed when he told Matt that he loved him, over and over, like a mantra, and Matt couldn't bear it, kissed him to shut him up. It was too much truth to comprehend right now. Mello might be an asshole and a liar and a manipulative bastard, but he told the truth to Matt, at least about the most important things, and at the moment Matt couldn't think of anything more important.

"I love you too," he told Mello quietly, and wished he could add: _Don't die, don't die, don't die,_ but that would be even more pointless than trying to pretend that everything was all right, the way that they just had. Some things weren't meant to be said, perhaps; he knew that Mello knew that what was to come scared the hell out of him. That seemed to be enough.

-

**Happy**

The first time Matt was shot at the barricade, it just grazed him. It still hurt like hell, but it was the next one, second third fourth fifth sixth until he lost count, the ones that pierced deep, dull and aching like too many punches, making heart and veins pound within him, that made him realize that he wasn't going to get out of this alive either.

It almost made him happy.

The world blurred and tilted, noises sounding far away, and he breathed in smoke one last time, and then he was gone.

-


End file.
